Could it really be? A return for Silvio Berlusconi only a year after he was bundled out of office to the strains of "hallelujah" from the crowd outside the presidential palace? Another political comeback for the disgraced media tycoon is not as improbable as one would like to imagine. There are powerful forces against a Berlusconi comeback: the majority of his people are against it, and in this age of protest votes, the man who had governed Italy for eight of the previous 10 years would be hard put to reinvent himself as the face of change.

But as always, this is not the whole story. The billionaire has seemingly limitless amounts of cash to throw at a campaign. And in recent comments in which he talked up the advantages to Italy's export-led industry of trading again in lire, Berlusconi is on to a potential election winner. Italy is more Eurosceptic than it often appears. While it remains pro-European in the sense that Brussels is seen as a more consistent provider of good governance in Italy than Rome, the euro itself is associated with inflation. Today it has become the icon of stagnation. Mario Monti's popularity, as the technocrat whose sole task is to reduce the budget deficit, has fallen off a cliff. Italy has no cash in the coffers to stimulate growth, as was demonstrated by a long-awaited growth decree. It was approved by cabinet only after it had been bled dry of its more radical provisions by the treasury. And yet without growth, Italy will be unable to repay its ever rising mountain of debt. The euro has acquired something of a bad smell and Berlusconi is far from being the only politician to latch on to the thought that Italy could regain growth through a return to the lira, devaluation and an export-led boom. But he could yet position himself to be its chief beneficiary.

The other path would be to put an end to some of Italy's more baroque restrictive practices. One of them occurred on platform 15 at Rome Ostiense station, when passengers boarding a new high-speed train operated by the private NTV operator were confronted by a two-metre-high steel barrier erected by the Italian rail network. It claimed that NTV's service centre, the station's former air terminal, was still governed by a clause in the contract that required the former air terminal to be separated physically from the station.

Barriers like these are beyond the capacity of a technocratic premier eyeing a future career in Brussels to deal with. Beneath him is a rightwing party whose vote is crumbling and a leftwing party that should win the next election, but for the protest vote that is going to the Five Star Movement, led by comedian and blogger, Beppe Grillo. All political bets are off. Hence the worrying twinkle in Berlusconi's eye.